FEI Shelby Walsh

Trend Hunter President Shelby Walsh was recently featured on the blog 'The Front End of Innovation.' Her interview with the blog highlights two emerging trends in the business world -- immersive branding and instant entrepreneurship. As Shelby explains, traditional advertising in the form of a billboard or a YouTube ad fails to forge an emotional connection with consumers.

Interactive experiences, such as the giant, in-store sleepover staged by IKEA, create an opportunity where the brand and the consumer can interact and become immersed with one another.

Instant entrepreneurship, which has taken off thanks to platforms like Kickstarter and RocketHub, enable people to connect with niche market consumers and to generate funds to get products off the ground.

The interview concludes with a look back at some of Trend Hunter's predictions for 2013. The crowdsourced platform foresaw the increasing importance of manufactured addiction and gamification. The site implemented its own gamification tactics nearly three years ago, which increased office productivity by 150%.

In today's world, you can't just slap up a billboard or post an ad to YouTube and hope it resonates with consumers. "Immersive Branding" is something that Trend Hunter is now seeing as a necessity of all brands that want to stay relevant. Brand is now about captivating consumers through interactive experiences, creating a totally immersive branded experience.

Trend Hunter has seen Cadbury create a fictional land called "Joyville" in the middle of the mall (costing nearly $10 million) and we've also seen IKEA host dozens of peoples for in-store sleepovers.